by Barry Stagg
August 1999
The latest fairy tale/nightmare out of Ottawa is that the prime minister is on-side with a hare- brained scheme to give millions of dollars of tax money to National Hockey League teams based in Canada. This will enable the working poor of Toronto and Beaumont, Notre Dame Bay to pay the salaries of Alexei Yashin and Mats Sundin. In return these fellows get to wave to the local peasants as they jetset off to their foreign homelands each spring.
This is audacious stuff even for the Liberal government in Ottawa that seriously supports subsidizing all the hotels in the prime minister's home riding. The next thing you know Brian Tobin will be back in Ottawa ready to do for Canada what he has so adroitly done for Newfoundland: use it as a personal throne upon which to advance the career of Brian Tobin. I personally think the premier should go back and finish his second year at Memorial University before he becomes prime minister, but that would be unfair, especially if he manages to extract a honorary degree or two from god-knows- where in the interim. But this has nothing to do with sports, but everything to do with money and power, so I will stop writing about it right now.
I want to know what Prime Minister Tobin will do about tax breaks to hockey teams. What if people who own hockey teams contribute a lot of money to the, as yet, undeclared campaign to vacuum Tobin from St John's and re-deposit him in the living room at 24 Sussex Drive? Would that make a difference to the newly-minted prime minister of all the hockey fans in Canada and Newfoundland? Will the Liberals' Newfoundland version of their Grand Wizard be able to offer anything more palatable to big time hockey people than could Toronto's own Allan Rock, he of the unquenchable ambition and the moth's sense of attraction to political disaster? Guaranteed, Rock would make such a mess of it that the teams would move out of Canada all together. How about the Mexico City Maple Leafs? Rock could do it with the cerebral assistance of Leaf general manager (????) Ken Dryden. This all means that only a fool or a really snobby Torontonian would put Rock into the prime ministers slippery shoes over our man from the PX's of Harmon Field and Goose Bay.
None of this helps us decide whether paying Tie Domi before we pay nurses and doctors is a good idea or not. Maybe we can get Ken Dryden to write a report or even a book on the dilemma. Perhaps he could ponder the metaphysics of the situation with special emphasis on camels through eyes of needles and angels dancing on pinheads. Then again, Dryden is the genius who fired the man who made the hockey trades that got the Leafs within three wins of the Stanley Cup finals. With that thought in mind, perhaps Mike Smith, late of the Leafs head office, is a better choice for prime minister. Darn, Smith is an American, a Nantucket Yankee even. We had better let Dryden attend to his own favorite vocation: touting the genius of Ken Dryden. Dryden and Tobin are a lot alike in that regard. Are they related or did they go to the same university lectures on Nick Machiavelli, power forward of another era.
Until next month: Be proud, be prosperous.